Displays that are capable of creating the illusion of depth have long fascinated viewers. While a conventional two-dimensional display shows objects that appear at the physical distance of the display, a three-dimensional (3D) display can create visual effects that appear to extend beyond the display itself, both in front of and behind the physical location of the screen.
One category of 3D displays is “glasses-based” 3D displays, which require a viewer to wear special-purpose eyewear (e.g., 3D glasses) in order to provide the viewer with a sense of depth. The special-purpose eyewear mediates the light arriving from a more distant display or is able to form an image itself. The eyewear provides stereo pairs of images to a viewer's eyes, which in turn provides the viewer with an illusion of depth.
Another category of 3D displays are “glasses-free” 3D displays, which can create the illusion of depth without requiring that a viewer of a 3D display wear special-purpose eyewear or other hardware while viewing the 3D display. A glasses-free 3D display may project multiple views of a scene into space in front of the 3D display in one or multiple directions. A glasses-free 3D display may simultaneously display multiple views of a scene (e.g., 2 views, tens of views, hundreds of views, etc.) to increase the range of viewable locations, increase perceived display quality, and/or allow a viewer to look “around” displayed objects. Examples of glasses-free 3D displays include parallax barrier displays that have a fixed barrier pattern on one layer and sub-images or integral images on another layer, lenticular displays that have an arrangement of cylindrical lenses on one layer and sub-images or integral images on another layer, and computational displays that generate content-dependent patterns to display using two or more layers in order to display a 3D scene.
A multi-view 3D display may be capable of simultaneously showing multiple (two or more) images corresponding to respective multiple views at corresponding viewing locations. A viewer may see different perspectives of a scene from each of the viewing locations. A glasses-free multi-view 3D display is called an automultiscopic 3D display. An automultiscopic display may allow a viewer to see around virtual objects as the viewer's viewpoint to the scene changes. As a viewer's head moves from one side of an automultiscopic 3D display to another, the viewer's eyes may travel through the regions where various images are projected from the automultiscopic 3D display. The images generated by an automultiscopic 3D display may represent various perspectives of a virtual scene, and through these various perspectives the viewer may observe the virtual scene with full motion parallax and stereoscopic depth. An automultiscopic 3D display may generate multiple views (the particular view seen by a viewer depending on position of the viewer relative to the 3D display), may exhibit binocular disparity, and/or may exhibit motion parallax in both horizontal and vertical directions.